


Black Irish Boys

by Jacobi



Series: Black Irish Boys [1]
Category: Stucky - Fandom
Genre: Artist Steve Rogers, Bittersweet, Black Irish, Bucky is #trying, Bucky needs a hug, Funeral, M/M, Pre-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-16
Updated: 2017-10-16
Packaged: 2019-01-18 01:34:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12378156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jacobi/pseuds/Jacobi
Summary: Steve’s Ma always used to say that Bucky was Black Irish. She also used to say that Black Irish boys were only good for busting lips and breaking hearts.Steve’s Ma wasn’t wrong.And Steve loved Bucky so much he could feel it in his god damn teeth.





	Black Irish Boys

  Bucky was Black Irish.

  That's what Steve's Ma liked to say before she'd shake her head and add, "You know what they say about Black Irish boys, they're only good for busting lips and breaking hearts."

  This would have bothered Steve a little more of it hadn't been true. But it was true. Bucky had a mean left hook and he broke a lot of gals' hearts just by looking in their direction.

  Then Sarah Rogers got sick and she was okay until she wasn't and then she died and...

  Steve's world turned upside down, shaken up like the millions of snow globes that lined the shelves of the department store in December.

  But Bucky, he kept being Black Irish. He kept breaking hearts and he kept busting lips.

  The thing that Steve missed the most about his Ma was that she always told it to you like it was, and she didn't judge people by their situations.

  She told Steve that it was probably true, what people said about Bucky being illegitimate along with the rest of his siblings, but that he was welcome to come over to share the already meager dinner they were having anyway.

  Bucky didn't cry at the funeral, which wasn't much to look at. Just a small gathering of the nurses who had worked with Sarah at the hospital and some of the patients who had survived her. She was buried next to her husband. Steve never knew his father except from looking at him in the few grainy pictures his Ma kept in a photo album.

  On the way back to Steve's apartment, Bucky had been dead silent, didn't even crack a dirty joke at anyone's expense. That's how Bucky cried, he kept all of his hurt inside until you could see it in his eyes and the way his broad shoulders never straightened out fully.

  Steve's Ma used to say that Bucky didn't know how to cry properly because his soul was too light to carry sorrow.

  Bucky hardly ever got cross with Steve, either. It was awfully hard to get him riled up, and when he was, he yelled through his fists.

  Steve liked to think about this, the weird ways that Bucky processed emotion, because these days he was too numb to process anything for himself.

  Yesterday, Bucky had tangled his fingers in his hair and stared at the ceiling until he could unlock his jaw long enough to tell Steve that he didn't always have to do things alone.

  That was Bucky's way of yelling without really yelling.

  "Uh, Steve." Bucky's voice cut through Steve's thoughts. He put down the picture of his mother and turned around.

  Bucky was standing awkwardly in the doorway with a furrowed brow and a bleeding nose. Steve hadn't even heard him come in.

  "God, Buck. What happened?" Steve dragged him into the light of the kitchen to make sure nothing was broken.

  "Uh, I don't know." Bucky shrugged his shoulders hesitantly, which was new because when it came to fights, Bucky was always sure of them.

  "Well, who the hell hit you?"

  "Nobody. I was...crying. I was walking... The docks are near the graveyard, you know? And I just. I'm so god damn lonely, and- I loved her too, Steve. So I came to see you and I don't know, I don't know." Bucky touched the back of his hand to his nose and stared at it when it came away red with fresh blood.

  "Geez, I think you broke a blood vessel. Maybe you better sit down." Steve swallowed the lump in his throat. "I'll go, I'll just-"

  "Listen, Stevie, I- I can't stay. Right now. I'm, I hurt all over and I know you...I'm sorry. I gotta go."

  "Where?" Steve challenged. Except it didn't sound like a challenge, his voice came out too soft and made him sound like some woman asking after her husband or something.

  "Where? I don't know, I don't know, I just gotta go."

  "But where?"

  "Stevie, I haven't a god damn clue- hey, let go of me, will ya, c'mon let go-"

  "I gotta know, I gotta know where you're going-"

  Bucky looked at Steve so hard that it made Steve’s voice falter. Bucky looked ghoulish, tough, leering, with the blood running all down his chin and dropping onto his shirt.

  "Pal," Bucky said slow and quiet. "I've got this itch under my skin that makes it so I want to climb right out of it. I have to go. I don't know where. I'll know when I get there."

  Steve had no choice but to let him go, bleeding and all as he stumbled out of the door, closing it softly behind him. And that wasn't like Bucky at all, he was always slamming and stopping around, never quite used to his own strength.

  Three days later Steve's eyes flew open. The apartment felt whole again, something about the way you can feel another's presence by the change in air pressure. Somebody else was taking up a Bucky-sized space that hadn't been occupied since before... before the sickness and the nose bleeds and all of the silent yelling.

  Steve felt such an intense wave of relief when he saw Bucky's back facing him from the kitchen that he had to hold onto the door frame of the bedroom.

  Bucky was beautiful. There were no two ways about it. Steve had made him sit for a hundred thousand art class portrait projects and he knew every single imperfect perfection across Bucky's skin and yet... he was still beautiful. He had what Steve's Ma used to call the Black Irish Beauty that went along with breaking hearts and all of that business.

  "What are you lookin' at?" Spoken before Bucky had even caught a glimpse of Steve, not even all the way facing him.

  "The space you take up." Steve said. "You fit a little better in your skin?" _Still looks a little small to me, with the way I can see your_ _ridiculous build under that shirt_

  "Guess so, maybe. I don't know. I know I fit better here than in a bar." Bucky shrugged, looking at Steve, waiting for a reaction.

  "Oh yeah? How so?"

  "Here's home. I loved your Ma. But the thing is, you're still here and I've been a terrible friend."

  Steve let a smile quirk the corners of his mouth. "It happens. Did the bar have good music?" He pushed passed Bucky to grab the paper on the table.

  "That's all you care about, little starving artist. You know, it's a good thing I came back, what exactly where you expecting to eat in these empty cabinets? Air?" Bucky knocked his shoulder against Steve. It was a little too hard and it sort of hurt, but Steve didn't mind. This was the Bucky that slammed doors and moved with a purpose.

  "I don't know."

  "Well that makes both of us."

  "Did you lose your job at the docks for missing all those days?" Steve asked, flipping to the job section of the paper.

  "No, I still went to work." Bucky replied. And that hurt. That hurt real bad, because the money was more important than Steve. "I had to, how was I supposed to come back with no job looking sorry as hell and expect you to let me stay?" So it hurt a little less, but it still stung.

  "Yeah, 'cause that's the only reason I live here in this apartment that both of us own and got together, 'cause you got a job." Steve shook his head. It wasn't a comment that Bucky had to reply to, so he didn't. That was another thing about Bucky, he wasn't so free with words. People would have never believed it, but it was Steve who did most of the talking at home with Bucky slipping in a few remarks.

  Bucky only talked when he got nervous or stressed. Steve always got a kick out of the way girls gushed over how easy Bucky was to talk to and the way guys wished they had that much ease with the ladies. It was a real riot. Bucky could be downright difficult on normal days, and he always got nervous as hell around girls.

  There wasn't any logic to it, as far as Steve could tell, but Bucky just about worked himself up onto a fit before every single date.

  He made Steve's teeth hurt when he put his hands on the back of the chair at the dining room table. Steve didn't realize how much he kept looking for Bucky's motions until Bucky came back and brought his movements with him.

  "I could draw you just like that a thousand times." Steve said without thinking. Like clockwork, Bucky's eyebrow quirked up and brought the side of his mouth with it in a surprised smirk.

  "I'm not doin' a thing." He said.

  "Yes, you are. You're puttin' your hands side by side like that, lining up all of your knuckles like you always do. Look at that chair, I bet there are marks where you've worn away little spaces for your fingers to fit." And Steve didn't just bet this, he knew this. He'd checked himself.

  Bucky didn't check. He didn't actually care all that much one way or the other. He was too busy watching Steve softly and practicing stillness. It had been a while since he'd been still.

  "I'm sorry I left."

  Steve shrugged. "No, ya aren't."

  Bucky opened his mouth to protest, but Steve rustled the paper noisily to drown out any beginnings of a comeback. "But you're glad you came back."

  Bucky couldn't argue with that, and so he didn't.

  They fell back into their old ways so easily that Steve almost forgot about the circumstances under which Bucky had suddenly left.

  It wasn't until later, when he was picking up night classes on art history, that it hit him. Staring out at him from the borrowed textbook's pages was a self portrait of an artist's "mental break down"- as it was titled.

  Except Steve saw Bucky standing with his hands helplessly at his side, blood streaming down his face and confusion in his eyes. Steve's Ma used to say that boys like Bucky needed to be held sometimes so that they could feel the ground beneath their feet. She held Bucky a lot. To Steve's knowledge, Bucky never instigated it, but when he found himself in Sarah Rogers' arms, he was quick to hug back.

  "Hey, Buck," Steve called when he got back to the apartment. There was no answer. Steve locked the door and followed the draft of cool air to the open window. Bucky was silhouetted by the light from the apartment and the stars as he leaned against the railing of the fire escape, his back to the window.

  Steve climbed out and came to stand beside him. Bucky glanced down at him, something indecipherable on his face and glittering behind his eyes.

  "How are you?" Steve asked, trying to make his voice sincere. Bucky sensed the weight in the question. He scrunched his nose and squinted up at the stars.

  "Ah, you know... I'm okay."

  "What happened that night? When you came home with blood all down your face?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean it didn't look like you, Bucky. Your eyes were so...wild, I don't know," Steve shrugged, trying not to come off as judgmental.

  "Christ, I dunno. I was walking back home and I just... the graveyard was _right there_. I couldn't... _handle_ it. I _couldn't_... I don't do so well with loosin' people." Bucky tried to brush it off. Steve pushed more.

  "She called you Black Irish, my Ma. She loved you just as much as me, Buck. I know she did."

  A muscle feathered in Bucky's jaw and he made a face. "I know, I know. Let's not talk about this right now, Steve."

  "You had a mental break down, Bucky. You're still picking up the pieces. We're gonna talk about it." Steve crossed his arms.

  Bucky threw back his head and laughed at the stars. "Yeah, you know, I _did_! I sure as hell did loose my head! Maybe you don't _get_ this, but I'll never be _over_ it. They say it gets better and I don't believe that. I don't- I _loved_ her, what else was I supposed to do?! I _loved_ her and I _promised_ her I'd take care a' you and I- nobody puts flowers on her grave. They don't, Steve. It's like she's just. She's just. _Gone_."

  "Well." Steve chewed on the words that were clumping in the back of his throat. _She is gone._

  Instead, Steve settled for "I loved her too." Which maybe wasn't such a good idea, because after the words left his mouth, Bucky's shoulders sank.

  "I know, I- that was a stupid thing to say. I'm selfish as _hell_." Bucky muttered. The air between them was charged in a bad way, the silence suddenly becoming awkward. Steve felt like he was waiting for the other foot to drop.

  "Yeah, but I already knew that." Steve found himself saying. _And that's why I love you._ "I know your soul, pal. You're always forgettin' that. That I know you and you know me, and here we are tryin' to push each other away by sayin' things that make us out to be terrible people."

  "So what's it gonna be?" Bucky crossed his arms and tipped his head back again to look at the stars. Little pin-pricks of light in that black, hungry sky. Steve could see the shadows gathering at the corner of Bucky's jaw. He wondered how they would taste.

  "You already known I'm not leaving."

  Bucky grabbed Steve's wrist a little too hard and it felt good, it felt good, that pressure of Bucky's thumb on his pulse.

  "Then you gotta know that just because somebody loves you don't mean they won't leave."

  A million things crossed Steve's mind. Things he should say and things he shouldn't and somewhere in between lay the things that he wanted to say. But Bucky's lips were moving again, his voice scraping gravelly and sweet on Steve's half-deaf ears.

  "Don't go and get your heart broken over a fella who's gonna leave you, Stevie. People say all sorts of things they don't mean and you always seem to believe them."

  This time Steve felt like it was Bucky who knew his soul, because Bucky had said fella not gal. And the jig was up. Bucky's eyes said I know, said I always knew, said it's alright.

  Steve swallowed hard. He imagined his hand was going numb from Bucky's grip on his wrist. He knew for sure there would be a bruise blossoming on his skin by morning. "Then don't goddamn leave me if you're so inclined to worry."

  Bucky let go and Steve climbed back through the window.

  They didn't talk about that night ever again. Bucky never let fella slip from his mouth instead of gal ever again. Except it weighed heavy in his heart. 

  “Boys like Steve,” Steve’s Ma used to whisper to Bucky when Steve was coughing up a lung in the bedroom, “they can’t ever be left alone.” 

  But the problem with that was that Bucky, he was Black Irish. And all his life, no matter how hard he tried to be mild and sweet, the only thing he’d ever been good at was busting lips and breaking hearts. 

  

**Author's Note:**

> Heyo- hope you liked it! This is my first Stucky ficlet so sorry if it was a little rough


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